Changing Our Comment System, Growing a Community

TechRaptor has now been around for almost 7 years, and in that time (with the exception of ~6 months), we've always used Disqus for our on-site comments. Over the years, Disqus has changed and added features, enhancing our readers' ability to interact with each other. It's been a good system, but today we're changing for a handful of reasons that are partially feature-based, as well as performance-based.

You may know Insticator's "Quiz Widget" that has been on TechRaptor for a little over a year. It offers questions about gaming, and even some about TechRaptor, that you can answer and earn points for. It's fun looking at the stats, seeing what people are answering, and thinking up new questions to pique your curiosity every few months. For us, it's something fun for our community, that also has an added bonus of helping us make a bit more money that can be used towards giving you even more content.

Insticator is now offering a fully-featured commenting platform for its partners, and after discussing with our Account Managers, we decided that moving to this platform made a lot of sense for our community for a few reasons:

• It features every feature that Disqus does, BUT has no monthly fee or limitations. It's ad-supported from a monetization standpoint, and those ads will be non-intrusive as all of our ads are.
• Users can login with Disqus or Google/Facebook. Also one-off accounts. When our membership goes live, we can FULLY integrate!
• Insticator also has their OWN moderation team, that reviews EVERY comment on the platform. We set the policy, they follow it!
• The platform actually has its own "currency" that our users can earn by commenting, reading, interacting, and sharing. You can use this to promote a comment, prevent a user from posting for an hour (this should be funny to watch, but if it gets out of hand we’ll disable) and more.
• You earn these points by getting followers, posting comments, sharing comments, or getting votes and likes. (See more by clicking "help" at the bottom left)
• AT THE MOMENT - All past comments are missing from the platform, BUT they'll be re-imported in the future. A note will be added above comments to reflect this.

For TechRaptor to keep growing in 2020, 2021, and beyond - we've long felt that community is what will drive us forward. Between our plans for membership, growing our Discord, and the ability for commenters to interact even more directly - we think that we're slowly building all the tools users need to become a part of our "Pack."

We would not be here without the support of our readers, 100%. Between the Kickstarter (physical rewards in Feb, membership rewards at new membership launch), Patreon, Subscribestar, sharing our articles, and just reading us without an adblocker on, our readers are what make this site what it is.

The new system is now live on TechRaptor, so if you have any questions or concerns, you can easily voice them here.

We're looking forward to finding more ways to interact directly with you as time goes on, and we can't wait to see more of you in Discord and in our comments!